Qatar has emerged as the pea-sized power behind the Arab League's tough new
stance over Syria.

Almost exactly a year ago, the Queen hosted a state dinner for one of the world’s more colourful couples, the portly Emir of Qatar and his spectacularly attired wife, Sheikha Mozah. I wrote at the time that there were two interesting things about their tiny country, which few Britons could pinpoint on a map and even fewer pronounce properly. One was banal: it was very rich. The second struck me as odd, but it was what a number of people had told me: one diplomat said, “Everyone suddenly seems to hate Qatar.”

In the intervening 12 months, the emirate has become much better known. Its jets have flown alongside our own over Libya. It has showered largesse on pro-democracy movements, even as its pet television station, Al Jazeera, publicised their revolutions. At home, the Emir announced the statelet’s first elections. Yet the dislike has only got worse. What has the poor old nouveau riche country done?

I’m not just talking about winning the right to host the World Cup in 2022 back in December – although the subsequent abuse of its culture, temperature, and manner of victory did, in retrospect, set the tone. Even though football fans never went so far as to burn the Qatari flag, that is what a lot of Arabs have been doing. At first, it was because they were paid to: dictators such as Colonel Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak, seeing the Qatari hand in the revolutions that were bringing their reigns to an end, got out the bovver boys. But now there are protests in democratic Tunisia against Qatar’s interference in its politics, while in Libya, even those who have most cause to be grateful are complaining.

Take Mahmoud Jibril, formerly Libya’s interim prime minister and a man who, had it not been for the Emir, might now be swinging from Gaddafi’s gibbet. This week, he excoriated Qatar as “the most obvious” case of foreign powers relentlessly pursuing their own interests. Abdulrahman Shalgam, Libya’s envoy to the United Nations, was blunter. “Who is Qatar?” he asked in a television interview. “Does Qatar even have an army? Qatar only has mercenaries.”

The emirate has undoubtedly behaved in two ways that are beyond the normal expectations of Arab states. For a start, rather than standing to the side and opining fruitlessly – the traditional role of the Arab League – it has jumped in and got its hands dirty. It had hundreds of its special forces in Libya, shipping in much-needed arms and advice to rebel bands. It was also the prime mover in the Arab League’s unexpected decision this week to go beyond hand-wringing over Syria and vote to deprive Bashar al-Assad of his place at the table.

On the other hand, Qatar has also gone further than removing dictators. Its money and influence have shaped these countries’ post-dictator politics in an Islamist way. It is host to Egypt’s most important cleric-in-exile, Yusef Qaradawi. It is friendly – to say the least – with the well-funded Ennahda, the self-proclaimed moderate Islamists who won Tunisia’s elections. And in Libya, its propulsion into the spotlight of Islamist militia leaders has been so controversial that even mild-mannered Western diplomats have spoken up. After Tripoli fell, one was alarmed to walk into a meeting at the defence ministry to hear them say that they couldn’t take a decision on one thorny topic, as they hadn’t yet consulted the Qatari chief of defence staff.

The Islamist connection is red rag to the world’s two leading sources of conspiracy theory. The Left points to the West’s close friendship with Qatar, which is home to 13,000 US troops and its Central Command, and says this is part of a capitalist plot to sabotage Arab democracy in the interests of Western oil supplies. The Right says that President Obama has been suckered into laying the ground for a new wave of Islamic conquest – more pacific than al-Qaeda, maybe, but no less hostile to Western principles.

These theories can be partly true without being conspiracies. Yes, Washington has had ideological problems with Qatar. But presidents have taken the view that since Islamism is the region’s dominant ideology, it is better to do business with Islamic rulers who have a vested interest in taking on nihilistic regimes, whether secular (Gaddafi) or religious (the Taliban). Qatar practises an Islam that is devout but not so oppressive as to ban bars, women drivers, or other religions, and is promising to ensure that the region’s tumultuous revolutions toe the democratic line. Whether you are on the Left, Right or centre, that sounds like the sort of friend the US should be making.

There is another point, too. In the old world order, there were only two powers whose interventions counted: America and Russia. Today, the US can no longer claim exclusive rights to a policy of using money and troops to win friends and influence people. It may surprise us that some of the new players in the Great Game are the size of a squashed pea. But it shouldn’t shock us that they want to have their say.